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Small tips that make a big difference.

Part 1 of 3 - The power of the title tag

Piranha Designs - Thursday, January 20, 2011

We all know that ranking well on Google can completely change your business. Many companies rely on Google for most of their leads and sales. I run a website for one particular client who does no offline marketing at all; all sales come from being well ranked on the search engines.

But this can be incredibly frustrating as you are competing with the whole world, and that sounds daunting...

Many of my clients ask me:

How can I beat my competitor on Google?

What can I do to go up the rankings?

Unfortunately there is no single easy trick that will boost your rankings, but there are some secrets that can definitely improve your rankings and these are easy to implement. It's just a matter of knowing what to do or ask your designer to do.

Ok, let's get into the secrets:

Secret 1

Your title tag is incredibly powerful. You need to know how to use it.

Every page on your website has what is known as a title tag, this is a small tag within the code of the page that tells Google and visitors what this page is about. Imagine if you had to organise the world's data, you need some kind of tagging system, your title tag is the starting point.

So what do I put in my title tag?

This is where the secret lies; most companies will do the following:

* ABC Company Ltd - Shoes and slippers for adults

* ABC Company Ltd - Homepage
* Welcome to ABC Company Ltd

All the above are examples of what NOT to do.

Google spiders will use the first words in your title tag to identify what your website is about. The closer the right keywords are to the start of the title tag the more relevant they are.

If you are selling shoes like the ABC Company above, then your title should be something like:

* Shoes, Slippers, High heels, trainers for adults from ABC Company

However you can still improve on this.

Here are 3 examples of title tags:

1. Gibraltar Accountants at GibAccountants.com

2. Gibraltar Accountants

3. GibAccountants.com - Gibraltar Accountants and Auditors

Which one do you think would rank best for the search "Gibraltar accountants"?

Well it would be number 2. Although all three include the keywords number 2 is more focussed. This means that the keyword density is higher. The more words in the title tag the more diluted the keywords become.

This is great if you know the exact keyword you are optimising for but you can also use variants and different spellings to your advantage:

Gibraltar Accountants - Accountancy in Gib

It is important to have 10 words or less in the title tag, but at the same time, you can use other keywords that help support the main keywords which are at the beginning of the title tag.

So whenever possible ensure the following:

1. each page in your site must have a specific title tag

2. that title tag should be focussed on the keywords

3. the keywords should be first and as undiluted as possible

This little known secret can make a huge difference to your websites rankings and its overall success on Google and the other search engines.